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The Wandering Company brought him into Rivendell when they returned in the twilight.

Maglor had never dared come so close before. He had feared it as a burned child feared the fire; and he had longed for it. He had also suspected that he wouldn’t be able to come near without drawing the eye of the valley to him, and he had been right.

“We found him on the eastern bound,” said the Elf who led that grey-cloaked company, and gestured to Maglor, whose hands were bound behind him. “He was lingering on the border as though uncertain of his welcome. I did not sense ill intent, but it seems to me that great power and doom cluster around him. Many things have been flushed into the light since Minas Morgul fell, and he would not give his name. It would not be the first time that a shadow fled from the ruin of a greater evil, only to seek succour from its enemies.”

“No, indeed,” said the lord of Rivendell, in a voice that was still familiar even yet, though it was richer than that of the boy Maglor remembered: full of years and learning, brightened by music and laughter, deepened by sorrow. “But is that just cause for imprisonment, and is my house to become a prison?”

“That is for you to say,” said the Elf; “or him, if he chooses to speak!”

Maglor knelt with his face averted, hoping his features were masked enough by layers of neglect and wear and long wandering to avoid recognition.

“It seems to me that the time for the taking of prisoners has passed,” said Elrond, and he had come closer. He was standing before Maglor, and his unseen gaze was a weight pressing on the crown of his head. “It is a new age, one of pardon and of amnesty.”

His voice changed. “Will you not look at me?”

There was no power under the words, no suggestion or binding in them to force Maglor’s chin up whether he would or not. There was a wistfulness in it, however, that was the father to wishing, and Maglor was powerless to deny Elrond anything.

He had been a fool to think that Elrond might not know him.

He lifted his eyes to Rivendell’s lord, who was indeed tall and wise and mighty. Elrond had grown to look like the great Kings of his house who had fallen to the dark long ages past, but his eyes were ancient and gentle, like silver which had withstood long years of service, scored with innumerable lines until it was soft with light.

What Elrond saw in his face, Maglor did not know, but there was sorrow in the eyes as there had been in the voice, and they looked at each other a long time.

Worlds had ended since they had last looked upon each other. Kingdoms had risen and fallen, great kings and queens born and died, and the Shadow waxed and waned and waxed again, only to be sternly rebuked at last.

“He is a kinsman,” Elrond said. Gesturing to one of the company, he had a knife brought to him, knelt to cut Maglor’s bonds, and raised him to his feet.

-

They did not yet say any of the things that must be said between them if they were to speak at all. Not with so many of Elrond’s household about them, the rising interest like the sound of bees when a swarm drew near. With quiet words, Elrond drew Maglor up the stone steps into Imladris, and of that long-imagined place, he saw only a riot of colour, of light, of richness and textures; things his tired mind could not hold, slipping from it like water through his fingers.

Then there was silence like darkness descending. Doors closed between him and the greater house, and through them all household noise was muffled. He was in a room with a high arched ceiling like a ship turned upside-down, and a great hearth which was screened by a heavy fireguard of finely-worked iron, so that the inhabitants of the room neither froze nor scorched.

There were tall windows set with diamond-panes of greenish glass, beryl or crystal, which filtered light through them like veils of sea-water. There was a great desk with many carven panels, and the chair behind it sat under a canopy of rich blue velvet worked with silver stars.

Elrond did not move towards the seat of his authority. Instead he led Maglor to the oak settle before the fire and drew him down to sit beside him. Maglor did not trust himself to speak. He did not know what to say, or what could be said between them.

Elrond said, gesturing to his hand, “Will you show me?”

Maglor curled his fingers into a fist; but he could deny Elrond nothing, after all, so at last he offered it to him. Elrond gently removed the stained and filthy bandage knotted around it, and then the full disaster of his palm was revealed to the firelight.

The burns were precisely as they had been when they had first been made, thousands of years ago. There was nothing new or interesting to Maglor in them. He had lived with them every day since. He had tried to heal them with poultices; he had dressed them with care; he had neglected them and left them to mortify. But they did not alter, whatever he did.

From the edge of his hand to the mount of his thumb, the flesh was raw, weeping a clear fluid that tasted like saltwater. He did not like to look too closely at the cratered damage of bone and tendon. Around it, the skin was stiff, waxen white, and devoid of feeling. Beyond that, across the pads of his knuckles and up along the insides of his fingers, ran hot red blisters that did hurt, and which occasionally burst, became fresh wounds, and healed only to form again.

Elrond, who had not seen it before, drew in his breath. “This is fresh!”

“No,” said Maglor; and those were the first words he said to Elrond Eärendilion since the drowning of Beleriand and the breaking of the world. “It is old.”

“That old?”

He nodded.

“It looks painful,” said the lord of Rivendell quietly. “Will you let me tend to it?”

“It would be pointless.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Oh, if it pleases you! But it won’t help, you know.”

The Star-Kindler herself had marked Maglor. Her brand named him thief and murderer. Elrond could not undo that judgment. Still he toiled over it; he cleaned it, and then he dressed it with herbs he crushed in his hands and which seemed to fill the room with the scent of morning.

It wasn’t a plant Maglor knew. Its perfume was sweet and strong. There was something nostalgic to it, although he had never encountered it before. It seemed to take him back before pain and loss, before evil done and evil endured, back to freshness and cleanness beyond the world.

He found himself weeping as Elrond rebandaged his wound.

“I’m trying not to hurt you.”

“It isn’t that. Only – memory.”

“Those pains I know,” said Elrond. Then, his eyes still on his work, “It has been a very long time since we last met.”

“It has,” Maglor said. “I never thought to see you again.”

“Why not?”

His bandaged hand was eloquence enough, surely. He lifted it from Elrond’s grasp and turned it to show him where straw-coloured liquid was beginning again to seep through the fresh linen. “Need I say more?”

“I think you must!” said Elrond. “Because I have wished to see you many times over the Ages, and I have looked for you, and I have had many things I wished to say to you; not all of them kind, but not all of them harsh, either. You have become a figure of legend, a wraith in the sea-mists: I heard many reports of laments carried by the wind, but every time I sought to find their source, I was baulked. It became clear to me long ago that you did not wish to be found. I have respected that wish. I have not sought you since Númenor sank beneath the sea. I have settled here, and raised my children, and protected my people. I have let you be, and now you have come to me at last. So I must ask you: why did you come, and why did you mean to go without greeting me? Why come now, and why like a sneak-thief in the night?”

“Should I have come with heralds and trumpets?” Maglor asked. “Should I have come to your door and loudly sued for entry? How should I have announced myself? As one who raised you as a child, or as that darkling lord who stole you from your rightful place? As one who cared for you, or as one who came with fire and sword to your boyhood home? As a prince of the Noldor? How could I dare?”

“That is not what I asked.”

“I heard that your daughter was married,” Maglor said, which earned him a sharp look. He was almost glad for it, despite the interrogation it seemed to prelude. Elrond had been too gentle with him. “I heard that you meant to pass over the sea at last. And – I wished to see you once more, before you sailed. I asked no more than that, to see you from afar! I never meant to come to your notice.”

There was a line between Elrond’s brows that reminded Maglor of Fingolfin a little: his uncle had worn a crease there often towards the end of his life. He couldn’t remember if Turgon had had the same frown. It was a strange thing to find on a familiar face turned unfamiliar. Elrond’s was a grown man’s face now, wise and seasoned, when Maglor remembered a boy glowing with youth and fresh promise, a bright thing in a dying land.

“I am trying not to be angry with you,” said Elrond, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Give me a moment.”

“You have every right to be angry with me. I know what I have done.”

“I’m not sure my accounting would entirely tally with yours,” Elrond said. “Do you not think it rather selfish, to come to make your farewell, and to rob me of mine?”

“I thought to spare you — not to burden you with my presence. Not to bring my shadow here – my taint.”

Or had he hoped only to spare himself? Maglor knew what he had told himself, but whether that was the same as what he had meant, he couldn’t say, under Elrond’s calm gaze. He had wanted to see Elrond again: that was selfish, perhaps. He had not wanted Elrond to see him: he had meant to be selfless.

He had feared being caught. But he had come anyway.

“I could wish that you had offered me the choice of being so burdened, rather than deciding for me,” said Elrond. Whatever storm of feeling had swept his face had passed, and his voice was as gentle as it had been at first. “But our choices have a way of dwindling until nothing else is left. You are here, in my home, where I have long wished you to be: and I am sailing. You have cut it quite fine! Two weeks hence you would have found me gone.”

Maglor shivered.

“We will talk more tomorrow,” Elrond said. “I have not yet begun to draw upon the store of things I have wished to say to you. But you are weary. It will keep.”

-

The hot water arrived in a shining copper ewer, its side warm to the touch. There was also a brightly glazed bowl, and a cake of soap that smelled strongly of lavender and some other, greener thing Maglor couldn’t quite identify.

He flinched when Elrond seemed about to help him wash, and the lord of Rivendell raised his hands and moved away, like a man calming a skittish horse. Maglor was inclined to call him back as soon as he had left the room. What an ingrate he was! Then he realised that he could still feel Elrond’s presence even as the distance between them increased, even through the closed door. It steadied him.

He poured the contents of the ewer into the bowl and stared down into it. His own face glared back at him, wavering on the surface of the water; a feral thing, a wildness of snarled dark hair and wide pale eyes.

It was quite wrong that the lord of Rivendell had held these grimy hands in his, so Maglor scrubbed at his face and hands with unwonted care. He wasn’t gentle with the wounded one. What right had it to tenderness?

The clear water clouded with soap and scum as Maglor bathed face and throat, then used the hem of his tunic to clean his body. His hair he could do nothing with at present but bind back from his eyes, but a strip of cured leather that had served to fasten his sleeve tight around one wrist would serve for that.

The fouled water no longer reflected his face back to him by the time he was done.

-

When the study door opened again, it wasn’t Elrond. It was an elf-lord all in black, looking at him with what seemed to Maglor to be suspicion. Noldor, from the look of him. Not entirely, however. There was something else there, perhaps in the shape of the jaw –

“I am Erestor, Lord Elrond’s seneschal,” said the stranger, raising his eyebrows at the openness of Maglor’s scrutiny. “I am here to direct you to your room.”

The way from Elrond’s study was different from the way they had entered. Erestor went to a panelled wall and put his palm to it, and it opened smoothly under his touch to reveal a long corridor lit along one wall by tall, narrow windows set with panels of stained glass. They were the right shape for arrow-slits, but far more beautiful.

Had the windows been built narrowly in order that they could be smashed in a time of siege? Maglor could see the logic. But it would have been a shame, to destroy the glowing white city on its green hill, the coiled black dragon, the many-petalled white flowers, the starry shield – the tossing blue-green waves of a distant sea –

At the end of the corridor Erestor turned, and led Maglor down another, darker hall, hung with tapestries. Between the tapestries there were doors. When they had passed several of them, Erestor stopped, his trailing dark robes settling around him, and selected a key from the cluster hanging at his belt.

“Here,” said Erestor, and gestured for Maglor to enter.

The room was far brighter than the hall, and the simplest part of Rivendell he had seen so far. The rest of the house was a jewel-box, love and care worked into every inch of it over thousands of years. This was a small white room with a curved roof that made him feel like he was standing inside a blown eggshell.

The wide windows offered a view of the gardens. Beyond the trees, he could see the distant curve of the valley, and the gold-green and brown hills beyond it, and the silver line of the Bruinen. It was a quiet space, uncrowded. There was a bed. A chair, by the window. A great chest, at the foot of the bed. A bronze lamp near the chair, as though the last inhabitant had worried about straining their eyes while reading. A candle at the bedside, protected from an ill wind by a flowering glass bubble shaped like a blooming rose.

“Now, I must ask: what arms have you brought into this house?”

How polite! They had not asked, in Himring and in the Gap.

“A knife,” said Maglor. “In my boot. A flute, at my belt – though it’s roughly made, and scarcely tuneful. A lap-harp, lashed to my back, under the cloak.”

“I do not think we need account instruments as weapons.”

“Those who do not are foolish indeed.”

Elrond’s seneschal studied him. Child of a later age or not, he examined Maglor very thoroughly, returning earlier scrutiny for scrutiny. Finally, he nodded, as though acknowledging both the truth of Maglor’s statement and of his accounting.

“Those you may keep. My lord suggests that you rest,” he said. “There are sleeping clothes in the chest. More fitting garb will be found if you leave your – current attire – by the door. One of the household will bring you refreshment before you sleep.”

There was a pause. Maglor knew that he should thank him. He had mastered courtly manners in a kingdom far grander than anything this child of latter days could imagine. He had once been a prince at the court of Tirion upon Túna –

“Elrond?” he asked, like an anxious child.

“Later.”

-

The same attendant who had brought him washing water brought him food. Maglor bestirred himself to thank her – there, he wasn’t quite an orc! – but managed little of it before he slept.

When had he last slept in a bed? When had he last put himself in someone else’s hands, and given himself up to their care? It was a painful question.

He had never meant to come to Rivendell, to speak to Elrond again: but it was done, and not by his will. He could – give himself up. He could stop, for a little while. He could let the decisions of others carry him forward, a leaf on the surface of the water, and take him where they would.

-

More food was waiting by the bed for him when he woke, into a room made strange by the pale golden wash of morning light. The porridge was still warm in its chafing dish. Invalid’s food, cheering and filling. He had been weeping again in his sleep.

There was hot water waiting, too, and more soap. A comb.

His worn clothing had disappeared, and someone – the same attendant? Erestor himself? – had left him a dark blue tunic and darker leggings. A cloak of brown velvet with slit sleeves, its edges lightly embroidered in silver thread, which came to his knees. Pointed slippers. Lovely things, but not the kind that would do at all in the outdoors, not for a moment: velvet would not provide the warmth and protection that his rough sheepskin had, and the shoes wouldn’t last long in the wilds.

That was a message, if you liked.

The comb was quite inadequate to its task. His knife wasn’t. Maglor hacked off everything below his shoulders. What was left he could comb out, with a little work, and a few more judicious slashes of the knife. The cut hair he gathered up and gave to the fire.

It stank as it shrivelled and reduced to ash, pulling at memories he preferred to forget.

-

He found Elrond not by asking, but by following the faint warmth of his presence through the halls, using it like a star to steer by. He found Elrond in his study, in the chair he had formerly eschewed, and he wasn’t alone.

“You seem considerably recovered,” said Erestor. He was as dour as before, and made no other response to Maglor’s appearance. Beside him, by way of contrast, was someone radiantly furious: a tall, broad Elf who rose to his feet, his mouth open and his fists curled.

“Glorfindel,” Elrond said warningly – but it couldn’t be. He might look very like that lord, but Glorfindel had been dead longer than Maglor had been scarred and singing to the sea.

“My lord,” said Glorfindel – if it was he. His fists loosened. “Do you expect me to break bread with a Kinslayer? I am loath to do so; as loath as I would be if Maeglin himself stood before me!”

“And in Valinor you might indeed be asked to do that,” said Erestor, industriously scratching something onto the parchment before him.

“Never, though the Valar themselves entreat it of me!”

Elrond sighed. “I hope that was not a solemn vow?”

“Quite unbinding,” said Glorfindel, shaking back his thick yellow hair. “I am not so foolish. And you are enjoying this too much, Erestor!”

“I always enjoy it when I have occasion to witness a cat flung among pigeons,” said Erestor. “That doesn’t mean that I like it any more than you, on the personal level; only that I have better self-control.”

“What a peaceful house you keep, Elrond,” said Maglor. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” said Elrond. “I trust you slept well?”

“Elrond!” said Glorfindel awfully.

“Whatever you wish to say would be best given as private counsel,” Elrond said. “I have heard Erestor out already, Glorfindel: I will hear you, too. Yes, he knew you,” he told Maglor, in response to his silent surprise; “and if he had not, still I would have told them both. Of all people, my master of arms and my chief counsellor have the right to know who dwells under my roof.”

“Say not ‘dwells’,” said Maglor. “I will not stay long.”

“Neither will I. Will you not stay at least that while?”

-

Elrond dressed his hand for him again, this time in the privacy of his own room. There was no change beneath the bandages, and Elrond frowned over it.

“Perhaps mirúvor,” he said. “A wet dressing? And something numbing – we must try to treat the pain.”

“You shouldn’t trouble yourself,” Maglor said. “Why offer me kindness, of all people? I have no right to it.”

“Is kindness a matter of rights? I don’t think so. I will be kind to whom I wish, and I will not believe that mercy offered is ever offered wholly in vain, accepted or not.”

“Eonwë lived to repent of his mercy.”

“Did he?” Elrond asked. “I don’t think so! One might be saddened that a chance offered was not taken, but still not regret the offering. It is the failure to offer kindness, I think, that people are more likely to repent of.” He stood up, tidying his things back into his medical chest. “I can’t make what was done undone. But I can offer kindness, and I can offer mercy, and I choose to do both, now, as I make ready to leave Middle-earth. You may take them or not, as you choose.”

 He stood up and strode over to the windows. They opened, at his touch, onto the garden terraces. “Now, my prescription for melancholy is fresh air, and tree-shade: it works a little better for our Silvan kin, but I think it will still serve.”

-

A little further along the terrace, as they strode, they found a very small figure was taking the air, curled up and asleep in an overlarge chair. Someone had tucked a blanket around his shoulders. A child, Maglor thought; and then – no, no child could be as old as that!

“A halfling,” Elrond said, as if in answer to his question. “Bilbo Baggins of the Shire; a brave hero, and a dear friend, and a guest in my house. We will not wake him.”

“It’s rude to speak of people behind their backs, Lord Elrond,” said the person under the blanket; “or behind their eyes, as it may be!” He opened one eye, round and rheumed with age, and glared at them.

“My apologies, Bilbo,” said Elrond, laughing.

“Who is that you have there with you?”

“A wanderer, come in from the cold.”

“I thought you had gotten rid of the last of those,” the halfling grumbled. “Didn’t you send Aragorn south, and your boys after him? He looks a little like Aragorn,” he added. “Cleaner.”

“Thank you!” said Maglor. Aragorn? he mouthed at Elrond.

“King Elessar of Gondor and Arnor, first of his name. My son-in-law, and Elros’s last heir. You are flattered, I assure you.”

“A Man?”

“Are you not a Man?” said the halfling. He opened the other eye. “No, no, I see the ears. I apologise! I’ve never seen an Elf with hair as short as yours. You must be a sensible sort of fellow. I’m fond of Elves – famous for it – but as a people, Elrond, you tend to spend a little too much time combing your hair, and washing your hair, and singing about your hair.”

“If you have ever caught me doing any of those things, Master Hobbit, I am much surprised. Don’t lump me in with your Silvan friends!”

“Oh, well,” sighed the halfling. He closed his eyes again, and made a gesture with a small hand, wrinkled like it had been suspended for a long time in water. “Tired. Your friend looks tired, too, Elrond. He looks like he could use a holiday. I would know!”

“I quite agree,” Elrond said, and they left him there, drowsing peacefully in the sun-shine.

-

Fresh air and tree-shade was likely only an excuse to resume the conversation of the day before, now that Elrond had done more than his duty by Maglor in terms of rest and care: but Imladris was sufficiently lovely that Maglor almost let himself forget the coming reckoning as they walked through the grounds. Oak and ash, chestnut and holly, hawthorn and apple. Hazel catkins bobbed in the wind, ready to shatter. The grasses were full of buttercups and clover, poppies nodding heavy-headed on their stems. Wherever the trees thinned, the ground was covered in pale wood sorrel. Late summer still lingered even as Imladris moved inexorably towards autumn, the weather as slow to turn towards winter as it had been since the Shadow ended. The Bruinen glittered through the trees, and when it wasn’t seen it could still be heard, the faint murmur of its passage over the rocks clear under the birdsong.  

He touched one of the holly leaves as he passed, running the tip of his finger over its prickly edge.

“Yes,” said Elrond. “For him. Shall we speak of it?”

“I don’t think I could bear to.”

Elrond let the subject drop. They had come into a small garden full of starry jasmine and climbing roses, their boughs thick and gnarled with age. There was a pond, and along its edges yellow laburnums trailed their long hair in the water. The flowers filled the air with invisible clouds of scent.

In its centre was a statue in a similar style to those Maglor had seen within Imladris itself – although now that he had seen a little of the gardens, it seemed foolish to divide the house from them, or them from it. It wasn’t quite Noldorin. There was a simplicity to the style, a tendency towards abstraction and a pronounced fondness for smooth, flowing lines that had to be Sindarin, or Silvan, or else something new since he himself had given up the company of other Elves.

It was of a woman, her hands spread in blessing. Her features were lovely and regular: but she was smiling, and there was something in the curve of it that made her face seem like a likeness rather than an idealisation.

“My wife,” said Elrond. “Celebrían.”

“She is very beautiful,” Maglor said. “And—she looks kind.” Was that the right tense? It must be, because Elrond wasn't cross; he was staring at the image of his wife, his face lined with yearning. No – expectation.

It might have been yearning once, but now it was something brighter. It was the kind of expression which looked towards the light, rather than into a long tunnel of darkness.

Maglor said, “I almost came to you then. When I heard she had sailed.”

“You didn’t.”

“No,” Maglor agreed. “I thought – I wanted to be there for you. But then I realised that I didn’t have the right, and that it was foolish to think that I could bring comfort to you, rather than more trouble.”

“Perhaps,” said Elrond. His expression closed a little. “It was a very hard time. There would have been trouble. But I would have liked to have seen you.”

They stood together before the image of Elrond’s wife. The birds sang. The Bruinen rushed on. Maglor waited, but Elrond said nothing more.

-

Another garden, closer to the house, was full of bees browsing in the clover, and of hives made from curved willow-wands.

“How can you bear to leave this?” Maglor asked. It wasn’t meant to be serious, only a commentary on the loveliness, but Elrond took it seriously.

“I can’t. But neither can I bear to stay, either. You are seeing Imladris only at the end of its long flower, Maglor. Its time of blossom was long ago, and it has been dwindling for centuries. That decline will hasten once I sail. One day, soon enough, this valley will belong to the trees and the river again, and the house will be gone. And sooner than that, my daughter will be gone, too: and how could I bear that?”

He had borne so many other losses. How had he survived losing Elros? Maglor couldn’t imagine. They had always been linked in his memory, two parts of an indivisible whole. He couldn’t ask, either. He had not come to Elrond then. He had lost his own brothers, one by one, and he had broken when he lost the last.

Elrond had lost Elros, and he had not.

Perhaps a daughter was different: Maglor didn’t know.

-

It was hard for him to think of Elros as dead. He knew it as a fact. He had known it for a very long time; but he had never really known it at all. The twins had vanished into Gil-galad’s army, into the mists and fogs and belching sulphuric clouds of a dying land. He had hoped they were safe now, and he had never seen them again. They had existed for him as at the same time both irretrievably lost and as only left behind for a moment, in another room. Until the moment he had laid eyes on Elrond once more.

In that moment, the passage of time had gained solid shape and mass. Elrond was here now, and Elrond had been gone, and in those years he had aged, had suffered, had known joys and sorrows. He had grown from slender-shouldered stripling into a wise man with a sense of depth to him like deep-blue water, a well whose shaft sank all the way to the bedrock. He felt so different. He felt like time passed and passing: like time lost, all the years that Maglor might have reached out to him, and had not.

And Elros –

Elros had been gone since before Imladris was built. Its trees and its waters were mellow with the passing of an Age. They had known Elves for a very long time.

Elros had been gone all that while, and now Maglor truly knew it. How did one bear it?

-

Rivendell was full of time. It held time the way a crystal held light. Its arched roofs with their carved beams housed a strange blend of Ages, and peoples, and crafts, Elven and Mannish, Sindar and Silvan, Noldor and other. It was a house without a chatelaine, a house whose ladies had left it, one after the other. A house whose lord was readying himself to make his own journey. It was full and empty at the same time, the rooms where no one lived any longer full of treasures left behind by those who had passed over the sea already.

There were ancient paintings that were still bright in the right light. You could tell something of the Elves who had painted them, or who had asked them to be painted, by their backgrounds: gold-leaf, or silver-leaf, or gold-and-silver.

There were trunks of clothes, stored up for winters and summers that wouldn’t come. They smelled of lavender and dust. Some were still whole, others time-eaten. Silks had shattered, fugitive dyes had shifted colour. There were carefully gathered shards of glass on which had been painted flowers, stars, sun’s rays, eagle’s wings and dead faces. There were bejewelled combs, and looking-glasses, and enamelled caskets. Some of the silver had tarnished, going black, grey, or white. Things wrought in copper had lost their pink-orange lustre and turned dark brown or sea-green.

He lingered over a small ivory figure on a little stand. Its arms might have been designed to hold something , but they had disappeared from the jointed shoulders, leaving the sockets empty, and the feet were damaged, too, like it had been wrenched away once in haste. It had a boy’s face, delicately modelled and unmarred. In the lines of its carved hair he could see traces of black paint. An inconspicuous hole on the top of its head suggested a missing crown. Some child had loved it dearly once.

Everywhere in the house were the echoes of Elrond’s line. There was a tapestry woven in dark green and silver, of flowers on a grassy ground, and in the midst of it Lúthien danced, her skirts flying around her white feet. A pattern of nightingales made up its border. The Star of Eärendil could be found everywhere, worked in silver, and in wood, and everything in between: inset with gems or cut in simple lines. A silver cup at dinner was engraved with lines from song: Where out of yawning arches came / a white light like unmoving flame.

And, curled around the frame of a silver mirror: And clear his voice came as a bell / whose echoes wove a wavering spell / Tinúviel, Tinúviel!

There was little that spoke obviously of Elros, but some of the strange objects and art that puzzled Maglor might have been Númenorean, long ago. There were paintings of Kings of Men, grey-eyed, in winged crowns. Most of them were dark, but one was blond, beaming, and in the face reminded him strongly of the erstwhile House of Hador. He could find echoes of Elros in them, if he looked hard.

-

There were many empty rooms. But there were many guests, too: Elves who had come in order to cross the sea in the same great convoy as Elrond himself. They were waiting for the last travellers from the Greenwood and from Lothlórien Dream-Flower. Then they would depart, streaming across the wilds and plains of Eriador, over the Ered Luin, down into Lindon. With them would go history, wisdom, learning and memory: beauty and song. And it would not come back.

Among this throng, Maglor passed, perhaps, as a wild Elf, who had come in from the wilderness to make that journey with them.

“You could,” said Elrond, to whom he had made this observation. He said it very carefully, and leaned forward in his chair, and gave Maglor the considerable weight of his full attention. “I would like you to stay until I go, and to take a proper leave of you — I am grateful that I have that chance — but I would be glad beyond measure if you chose to sail into the West with me.”

“Unkind, Elrond!” Maglor said at once. “Don’t offer me what I cannot have.”

“What makes you think that you cannot have it?”

“Valinor is barred to me. It has been so since I left its shores, and I have done great evil since. Do you think I would be allowed to sail West? Do you think I would be permitted to bring my shadow to that far shore: or that I should?”

“Do you think it is not there already?” Elrond countered. “You speak of a shadow: whether you mean the Oath or the Doom, both began in Valinor. If you speak of Kinslaying, that too started there! I think that we speak of the same thing, which we might now, if we wished, call History. It is done, Maglor. It cannot be undone, and we should not forget it. That does not mean it is still happening.”

“Neither is it over!”

“No – not as long as you linger here, and not as long as you refuse to let it end.”

Maglor laughed, quite without humour. “Do you think I haven’t tried? I wanted to give myself to the sea long ago, but Ulmo wouldn’t take me. Oh, he took the Silmaril! But me he cast back upon the shore.”

Elrond paled. "When? After —Maedhros?”

“No – after Númenor. The storm rolled in, and the earth shook, and the sea roiled. It felt like the ending of the world – like the drowning of Beleriand. I thought Middle-earth was going, too, and I was grateful, Elrond! But Ulmo took Númenor, and all Elros’s people, and not I. They say that they had grown dark and foul; but why them, if not I?”

“I have never understood what befell Númenor, nor forgiven it – quite. Those answers lie in the West, and I hope to find them. You wrong Lord Ulmo, I believe! I do not think the Valar would let you sail, if they thought you might bring evil with you into the Undying Lands.”

“I bring evil with me everywhere,” Maglor said. He gestured with the bandaged hand. “I have it on the best authority, Elrond. You argue well – but you can’t argue that away.”

-

There was another painting he found, a few days later. White light fell upon it as if directed by a careful hand, picking out the painted image of a woman standing on the edge of a cliff and blazing off the varnished surface. When Maglor drew nearer, it didn’t become much clearer. Inside the painting, the woman was half-obscured already by the light she wore around her throat.

She seemed like she was just about to move, to turn; to throw herself from the cliff into the distant sea. Her white gown seemed already feather-patterned, its edges blurring against and into her fair skin.

He stood before it for some time. After a while, he became aware of Elrond’s presence beside him, and turned to see Elrond, too, regarding the painting, his hands laced behind his back. He didn’t look at Maglor, who hurriedly dragged his sleeve against his wet face. He only said, “I will not apologise for keeping a picture of my mother in my house, but I am sorry to cause you pain.”

“Nor should you,” Maglor said. “Only – that is not her face; that is not how she looked, and that is not how it was.”

There had been no white gown. Only a grey kirtle, simple and serviceable, and a blue cloak. No ornaments but the heavy golden tangles of the Nauglamir around her thin neck. He had seen a girl with wet grey eyes, not the shining woman who glowed on the canvas. She had seemed so brittle. He remembered thinking that if he touched her, she would shatter.

Elrond said, “—I suppose not. The artist didn't know; he only guessed. The only ones who were there, after all, were you, and Maedhros, and my mother. Unless Amras—?”

“Dead already,” said Maglor. “Well, not quite – he was wounded, and we left him with some of our people and went on. He was dead by the time we came back. Your mother had—gone, and—” He broke off. “I was always glad you and Elros didn’t remember.”

They had never spoken of it much when the twins were young. Maedhros had given the boys the bare outlines of what had happened at Sirion from the time they were old enough to wonder. Just the facts, unsparing and unvarnished, and unflattering to themselves. Maglor had thought it too hard, the boys too young. It had been hard for them. They had been hard on them.

“I thought I remembered well enough,” said Elrond. “But I thought this was a likeness. Perhaps, over the centuries, I let it overpaint what I did remember? You would know better than I.”

The words hung there in the shadows with them, before the bright face that wasn’t Elrond’s mother.

-

Glorfindel found him a few evenings into his stay at the House of Elrond.

“I have been at pains not to make you share my table,” Maglor said. “Thus you find me dining alone in my room. Yet you seek me out?”

“I do,” said Glorfindel, erstwhile Lord of the House of the Golden Flower. He was holding a bottle of wine in one hand, and a pair of drinking-cups in the other. He was something impossible, a dead man walking again: and he felt impossible, too. Three Ages of the world had passed, but Glorfindel felt fresh and renewed in spirit, all most unmarked by the weight of past centuries and their horrors. He made Maglor feel older than Arda, filthier than Angband. “I have been thinking of when I last saw you.”

He sat down on the chest at the foot of Maglor’s bed, which offered the only other seat, and handed him one of the cups. Maglor raised an eyebrow.

“Wasn’t it the Mereth Aderthad?”

“The Tears,” said Glorfindel, and uncorked the bottle.

Maglor didn’t think back to the Tears very often. His thoughts tended to run in a tight circle, a well-worn rut in the grassy plain of his memory. They began with the Oath, taken in the darkness after the murder of Finwë and the theft of the Silmarils, and they ended on the crumbling shore of Beleriand, watching Maedhros walk away from him.

It was a wrench to pull his mind from that track and to drive it over unbroken ground towards events that hadn’t been part of that long chain of disaster. Towards the hurts he didn’t press over and over again in order to burst the trapped pockets of his festering guilt. The Battle of Unnumbered Tears was an agony he had let the green grass grow over, and now the earth of his mind yielded it up, with all the fresh pain of yesterday.

“Auta i lómë!” Glorfindel said, and Maglor put his face in his hands.

He hadn’t been there to see Turgon and his lords burst out of hiding into the full light of the sun, their silver helms shining white and their banners a riot of colour. He had only found them at the end of that long, long battle, blood-stained and weary, banners lost or draggled. He had been looking to them for answers. Why had Fingon moved so soon? Why hadn’t he waited?

Turgon had wanted answers, too. What had kept the Fëanorians so late? Had they meant the blows to fall swiftest and hardest on the forces of North Beleriand?

They had both been besides themselves, too worn out to be properly angry, but too angry to be kind. They hadn’t seen each other since the Mereth Aderthad. Turgon had vanished, and now he was back, and Fingon was dead, and the hopes of the Noldor in Beleriand were dead with him.

Glorfindel had been standing near Turgon’s side, his bright hair clotted with gore, arm in arm with Ecthelion and a few others of Turgon's lords. He had been frowning as Maglor and Turgon shouted at each other, but his face had softened when their voices broke, when Maglor had – briefly – pulled Turgon to himself and hugged him against his breast.

Maglor had not lost any brothers then. He had thought he understood it.

“You’re king now,” he’d told Turgon, against his ear. “You have to be. Fingon’s gone, and Finrod, too -- would you put it on that child’s head? It’s you, cousin!”

“Strange counsel from a son of Fëanor!” Turgon had said, pushing him back. His eyes had been red with grief. “Shouldn’t you be sieving in the mud for his crown?”

But it had to be Turgon. It couldn’t be Maedhros, not now. Not after Fingon.

Maglor had gone to his knees in the muck, and the lords and knights around them had knelt too. Turgon had glared down at him, unspoken things in his eyes, along with his furious grief; their history, and the history of the Noldor kingship, everyone who had died with a crown on their brow. Maglor had seen the desire on his face to refuse, but in the end Turgon knew his duty.

They’d drunk to the dead together, the survivors, before the Fëanorians retreated into Ossiriand, and Turgon’s people to wherever they’d come from. It hadn’t been much of a reunion.

“You remember,” said Glorfindel, and sloshed some wine into Maglor’s cup, then clanked his own against it. “No one else does.”

“I do,” Maglor said. He lifted his head. “I wish I didn’t.”

They drank together, the way they had after the Tears. When their cups were empty, Glorfindel filled them again.

“I have no head for wine any longer,” Maglor warned him.

“I don’t care,” said Glorfindel Golden Flower. "They tell me that you killed Egalmoth at Sirion. He was there too, after the Tears.”

Maglor drained the cup. The metal was very cool in his hand, warming only slightly in his grip. “Not personally,” he said. “But he died there, when we attacked it. Yes.”

“And you wonder why I won’t eat with you!”

“I don’t wonder.”

“You and your brothers!” said Glorfindel. “You were noble princes in Tirion, if not the kind I could gladly follow. You left us stranded in Araman. But you did the right thing when Fingolfin came, and you held the East, and you were lords of the Noldor. How did you go from the Tears to Sirion?”

“A long story, and a bad one, and there is not wine enough under this roof to get me to tell it.” Maglor gave a laugh that was closer to a sob. “You were dead! How did you go from Balrog-slaying to the House of Elrond?”

"I can tell that one quickly. I was dead, and then I was alive again, and the Shining Ones sent me back to Middle-earth. An Age had passed like an eyeblink, but there I was. You would like me to make a tale of it, I’m sure; something fit for a song. But that’s all there is.”

It was too awful and too wonderful and too huge to think about, so Maglor drank instead. Somewhere over the sea, perhaps, the dead might walk again. Glorfindel was solid proof of it. Somewhere through the shining mists, there waited not only the left-behind, the long-missed, but perhaps also the dead. Family, friends, victims, all thronging the pearly shores and holding out their hands. “Unexpectedly kind of the Valar,” he said finally, taking refuge in flippancy.

“Were they kind?” asked Glorfindel, turning his own cup around in his hands. His yellow hair was so bright it seemed not just to reflect light, but to emanate it. He glowed in the lamplight. “No: they merely were. They had a task for me. I pledged myself to Turgon and his line, and his line endured in Middle-earth. My honor and my word called me back.”

Maglor said nothing. Glorfindel narrowed his eyes at him.

“I wondered if you’d bite at that,” he said. “No? Well, here I am, watching over Elrond, son of Eärendil, son of Turgon. When he sails, I will watch over his sons until they choose to sail, too – if they so choose. Will my task be done then? Shall I return? I hope so; but if they linger, I may feel that I must. Perhaps after they go I will feel called to the White City, and to Arwen’s line. I can’t say.”

“Do you want to sail?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Glorfindel. “I won’t, until my task is done.”

-

He had hoped they would not speak of Celebrimbor at all. But, in another turn around the gardens, pausing in the dark green shade of a holly tree, his ghost found them, walking with Elrond.

“Why holly?” Maglor wondered. “What made him take it for his symbol?”

“It was the other way around,” Elrond said. “There was holly everywhere, once, in Eregion, so Celebrimbor took it for his own badge, and later the Dwarves planted it in his honour. But he never ceased to use the Star.”

“He should have,” Maglor said. It was strange to him that Elrond had known Celebrimbor: that Celebrimbor had come to know Elrond. What had they thought of each other? Had they spoken of Maglor and Maedhros, of the First Age? “After I heard what had happened—how he died—I wanted to make Sauron pay for it myself.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Oh, no,” Maglor said. “I did! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I still carry it with me: to evil end shall turn all things that they begin well. It is as true as it has ever been. I joined your lord’s muster, hooded and cloaked, the least part of a great army—I wanted to avenge my nephew, little though he would claim me as uncle in return! I fought with knife and bow from the shadows, hoping to do what I could — and you know what happened at the Dagorlad. You were there.”

“Yes,” said Elrond. He looked like he wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose again. “I do not think that the Dagorlad’s worst moments happened because of you: nor its best in spite of you. You take too much upon yourself. There are things you may have to answer for, on the far shore! Not that.”

“Elrond! Are you calling me arrogant?”

“I am!” Elrond said. “I do not think the Doom exists any longer, Maglor. It is done. It has been done since the breaking of Beleriand, since my parents set foot on the far shore. If you think it lingers, why would you stay here, at the dawn of a new Age, now that the greater Shadow is gone? Would you darken the future for my daughter and her husband, and all those who will stay?”

His own argument, turned against him like a knife.

It had been clear when it was Maglor and Maedhros weighing up Eonwë’s words so long ago. Maedhros thought Valinor should be spared their presence. But Beleriand was already doomed; they need not fear tainting it. Middle-earth had been falling all through the Second Age, and falling again through the Third. There were older and darker things marring it than Maglor. Now it was changing again, into something strange and new. It was losing its Elven star-shine, that Grace, but it would not suffer the Shadow any longer, either. Maglor had not thought — What did that mean for Middle-earth, if he trailed failure behind him still? How has his thoughts grown so set in their familiar patterns not to have seen that the balance had shifted?

”I don’t know,” Maglor said. The shore was crumbling under his feet. Then, falling back on a more solid truth; “You know what wrongs I have done! How can you ask me to sail with you anyway?”

“How could I not?” Elrond returned. “You raised me! No, it should not have been you; but you were kind to me, and to Elros, and Maedhros was fair. We learned much from you both. Was our childhood happy? No; but few were, I think, at the end of that Age! Were we safe? Well, we survived. Did we eat every day, and did we learn lessons we carried with us the rest of our lives? We did. Should I have loved you both, knowing what I did? You will say I should not; Maedhros used to say it often, and you have become his echo! But it would have been far harder, I think, to grow up without anyone to love, for fear of loving the wrong people. We loved you, and when you sent us away, we went. Do you think it wasn’t hard for Elros and I, after, to learn what had happened? Do you think I haven’t seen Maedhros burning in my dreams? I have; but it has been harder still to wonder, all these years, where you were, and what had become of you. You are a shadow because you have chosen to be, Maglor. Your fate will haunt me on that far shore; I will always wonder. I will always worry.”

“Elrond,” Maglor said. He closed his eyes. "You should not ask me this.”

“I do not appeal to your guilt. I would not use such a mean trick.”

“You are appealing to my love! Is that not crueller?”

“I am appealing to the light in you,” Elrond said. “It is there still.”

-

Elrond left him alone in the gardens to think, to try and work his way out of the cleft stick he had made of Maglor’s own logic.

He walked under the trees for a while, along the green paths of the valley. He could feel Elrond, a warm point of light in the distance. He pressed his brow against the trunk of an oak and let it cool his thoughts for him.

The sun had begun to wane by the time he found himself at the bank of the Bruinen. The river-banks were thick with butterbur and king-cup, with water-mint and irises. When he knelt to drink, his reflection was blurred and softened in the moving water. He could see only a pale wavering outline of a face framed by dark hair, smudged and unclear. When he shed his clothes to swim, he found the water was warmer close to the bank, and colder the further he swam out. Water was not Maglor’s friend, but it was his most intimate companion, the one constant of his thousands of years of wandering.

The river-bed was soft and yielding under the weight of his feet. The wind moved in the reeds. Birds called to each other, late starlings and diamond-voiced black-caps. Time passed like a dream, though the river kept moving, and though clouds kept washing across the sky. Sunlight and shadow ran their hands over the distant mountains. The valley was a golden bowl, a safe space, a space outside time. A space where time looped and repeated, where the same clouds had passed over and over across the same sky, and the same water had run over the same rocks. The same oak trees had dropped their acorns into the same river for thousands of years.

Time had not moved here in all that time, as the world changed outside the valley. It had thickened here like honey, trapping its inhabitants in amber. But soon winter would come, and the magic would begin to seep away, leaching into the waters and soil and rock of Middle-earth. It would scatter like seed on the wind, like beads of glittering water. It would not vanish, but it would disintegrate, spreading itself thinner, be found less often. It would never come together so intensely again, or hold together so long. The valley was already beginning to change.

It was something one got used to, the inevitability of loss. The lake that would rise in the river’s place would stand as a shrine to what it had washed away, to the earthly things that had been and could be lost. The empty rooms with their abandoned treasures would fill up. Things would be pried from their foundations, swept away with wood and bones, buried in silt. Maglor had seen so many bright things rise and fall.

He was tired of it.

-

The last murmurs of the day had begun to fade into the silence of night. No one would miss him at dinner. He had started to eat with the household occasionally, after Glorfindel bearded him in his den: it pleased Elrond, and it gave them more time together. But he could not manage every evening, or even most, and Elrond would not expect him at the high table tonight. He knew that Maglor would need to think.

Elrond had not begged. He had not used guilt; he had not told Maglor that he owed him this. He had simply told him something true. He would like Maglor to come. He would worry over him, if he left him behind in fading Middle-earth. If he did not sail, Elrond would never see him again, or know how he did, and he would always wonder. That worry would always be a shadow in that bright land, whether Maglor sailed or not.

He had spent so many years by the sea. The sea was an easier thing to lose oneself in than the river. The sea was deep-voiced and echoing, awesome and powerful, violet and green and black. It thrashed the shore, it howled, it raged. Maglor’s own voice got lost in it. The sea was never still. It never let time accrue slowly. It was going out, or coming in: it was carving away at the cliffs, it was wearing stone to sand. It never showed his own face to him.

He had wanted to give himself to it many times. He had stood on a spit of wet black rock and held out his hands to the white foam and dared Ulmo to take him.

In the river, in the gathering darkness, Maglor turned his thoughts over and over. Selfishness and selflessness weighed against each other: pride against penance, arrogance against abnegation. He had thought he had been engaged in the latter all these centuries. He did not like the image of himself that was forming. He could not look away from it.

— No, that was another untruth. He could look away. He had been doing that. If he never left the water, he would never have to decide. He could stay suspended in time, weightless, outside history and gravity. He could melt into nothing. He longed to.

Shadow was creeping over the hills, the woods and the valley, the banks of the river. The thousand voices of the trees had hushed, the leaves had gone silent. The moon had risen, and the stars had come out. The brown water of the Bruinen was black and silver.

Maglor threw back his head. “Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima!” he cried to the brightest star. “Lord Eärendil! What is your will?”

The stars did not answer. But something within him had shifted, to ask at all.

-

News had always filtered, eventually, from the great cities to the towns, and from the towns to the hamlets. News stuck in hamlets more than it did in places where there was more to talk about. The detail might get lost, but the outlines remained. The stories twisted, changing shape. They sometimes took decades or centuries to reach him.

The Kings of the Island of Gift had grown too bold and overweening, they said, and the Valar had punished them. Morgoth himself, or perhaps only his servant, had put on a fair face and come to live among the Elves! He had bewitched their Elven-king – no, he was only a lord – and put him to work making magic rings, and then the lord had woken from his enchantment and tried to mend the wrong, and they had used his broken body as a battle-flag.

No, the last king of the Elves had died in battle with half his great army. There would be no more kings of Elves. Yes, there was a new king, but he wasn’t calling himself that. He lived in an enchanted valley. There was a witch-queen in the golden wood beyond Rohan.

A year ago, they said that the Dark Lord had fallen, and the Shadow had ended, and there was a new king in the White City. That was a new story, one that had travelled quickly. The sea had sung of it, the trees had told of it, the birds had known. The land itself had shrugged off the weight of its long darkness. The sky had lightened. Spring had come early, and midsummer had been long, and lasted.

Maglor had made one of his rare visits inland to one of the towns of Men to discover what had happened. Why the sea had pulled back like lips from teeth one morning, and stayed away, far out on the horizon. It had rushed back in one great flood as the skies crackled and the earth shook. He had guessed that Sauron had been wounded sorely again. He had not let himself believe that he was gone.

The daughter of Elrond was marrying the King, they had added when they told him. There was a King of Men again. The lady’s train had passed through on the way to Minas Tirith. So many Elves! More than anyone had seen in centuries, like something out of a story. More than anyone would see again! They were leaving Middle-earth, all but the lady.

Maglor had thought about concealing himself among the great crowd of people going to see the daughter of Elrond married. He had toyed with the thought. No one would know him for an Elf, unless they saw his ears. He had longed to go, to see them from afar: Elros’s heir, Elrond’s daughter. Elrond himself. Artanis.

But he had known the thought was folly, and that so bright a day deserved no shadow on it. Darkness could not come to midsummer: Maglor could only bring certain ruin. So he had made a song for them, for the daughter of Elrond, and he had played it in the tavern, knowing that it would stick in the mind and stay on the tongue. Knowing that it would pass swiftly along the shores of Anfalas until it reached the White City itself, a wedding-gift carried on the air like blossom where he could not, would not go.

-

He felt it the moment Galadriel crossed into the valley. Her presence bloomed in his awareness of the world like a white flame.

“You look like a stag at bay,” Elrond remarked. The corner of his mouth turned up. He closed the book he had been looking into, his long fingers for a moment pressing against its worn red cover, and then set it aside, in the pile of things that would be returning to the shelves of the library and not coming with him across the sea. “Don’t worry! Galadriel will not chase you down. That is not her way. She knows you are here. She will see you, if you choose, and not otherwise.”

“Is that a guess, or more certain knowledge?”

“That is her message to you, as closely as I can render it,” said Elrond. He tapped his temple. The dark blue jewel on his finger glowered lightlessly, dull as a river-stone.

-

He had known that Elrond had sons. The reality of them, on the day they rode into Rivendell with their grandmother and the great convoy of Elves from Lothlórien, was something different.

Maglor had thought to see shadows of Elros and Elrond in their faces, as they had been when he and Maedhros had sent them away to safety. Instead, he saw Dior Eluchíl doubled. Elrond’s sons were the image of Dior the Fair, who had died long ago on Celegorm’s sword.

“Hallo!” said the first twin. His voice was deeper than Dior’s had been, and less musical. His hair was bound back by braids, not pearls and opals. “I heard we had a guest.”

“Your father has many guests,” Maglor said. He had been sitting under an oak tree, tuning his harp. Galadriel was somewhere in the house. He could feel it, which he had thought made being outside safe. Foolish! “He’s rather known for it.”

“Never you, however,” said Elrond’s son, and raised a black eyebrow. “Though he has long wished it.”

They were Elladan and Elrohir. He had known their names already. Elrond had told him, and Glorfindel had spoken of them in his cups. They were brilliant swordsmen, daring much and sparing themselves little. Like Maedhros, Glorfindel had said, in the time after Angband. Driven hard by something within, bright as flame.

They were grown men, and not boys.

Elrohir had a knife and was tossing it casually into the air with one hand and catching it easily by the handle each time. What had Elrond told them about him?

“Not much,” said Elladan, when asked. “He doesn’t speak easily of that time, or often; but he said that he was not mistreated.”

“We’ve heard stories, of course,” said Elrohir, and snatched the knife-handle from mid-air again. “But not from him. Maglor the Mighty, Lord of the Gap! Maglor the Accursed, swearing a fell oath. That’s a story tutors like to tell, as a warning. Maglor son of Fëanor, death to Doriath. Maglor son of Fëanor, bane of Sirion. Maglor son of Fëanor, cutting across the ranks of the Eastmen at the Thousand Tears to kill Ulfang with his own hands for his treachery.” He raised an eyebrow of his own.

“All those things, Elrohir son of Elrond.”

“I liked the Ulfang story, as a child,” Elladan said. “Less so the others!”

“I am not fond of them myself,” said Maglor.

They were wary of him, despite their casual speech. Their training was evident in every line of their bodies, in the easy way they stood, quite relaxed, but poised to move if needed. Elladan was less showy than his brother, but Maglor thought he had at least three knives on him, and likely more. They were hard polished mirrors of each other, the lovely faces of Luthien’s line almost working to bely their tempered steel.

They were assessing him less openly than Erestor had done, and less angrily than Glorfindel. That was wise. Were they taking the harp in his lap into their accounting properly? He would have to teach them better, if they hadn’t.

They wanted to know if he would fight a bout with them, together or one-on-one: that was less subtle.

They raised their eyebrows together when Maglor said that he hadn’t fought with a sword since the First Age, and didn’t mean to take one up again.

“Tell us about that, then,” said Elrohir. “Himring, and the Gap: and the Flame. Tell us about the Long Peace.”

“You are too old for stories,” said Maglor. But he found himself telling them anyway.

-

He kept outside, or to his room, and was grateful for the exit offered by its open windows. He had been foolish before. Elrond had not sought to trap him. The clothes Maglor had brought with him had been returned to him clean and darned, the boots he had bartered for in an inn somewhere over the Grey Mountains mended. He was free to go, if he wished. He had always been free to go.

On the third night since the Elves of Lothlórien arrived, he felt Galadriel drawing near to him, moving through the house towards him like someone carrying a candle through the halls.

She stood quite still outside his door. Not knocking, and not hesitating. Waiting.

“Come in, Artanis,” said Maglor. She would wait for him to break the stasis, otherwise: and if he didn’t, they could be there all night. He would have stayed silent even a few days ago.

The door opened. Galadriel entered, slipping through the opening like a ribbon of moonlight. She was wearing her hair loose down her back like a maiden in ripples of gold and silver. Her face had not changed at all since he had last seen her, long ago. That had been at their uncle’s court in Hithlum, which now lay at the bottom of the sea. Her feet were bare as a child’s, the train of her white gown long enough to drag on the floor.

“Cousin.”

“Cousin,” Maglor said. He closed his eyes. “It’s been a long time since I called anyone that.”

“Nor I,” said Galadriel. “Not since Celebrimbor died. He was the best of you, as you must know.”

“Oh, inarguably.”

She sat on the end of his bed, after a glance around the room for a better option. “An interesting choice of Elrond’s. The last owner of this room was a woman of the Dúnedain, whose people have not infrequently lodged here over the centuries. Distant kin, family and not family: a relation not easy to put into words, yet still acknowledged.”

Maglor had been ready for a frontal attack, and had girded himself against it. He had been swapping stories about siege warfare and war bands and orc-hunts with the sons of Elrond, and had flattered himself into forgetting that his cousin had once wielded a sword as well as any of them.

She had not come armed. But she had not needed to. She was like Elrond: her spirit shone so brightly he could feel it from afar, and, this close, he could tell how terribly, unutterably weary it was. She felt so very tired to him. So old. So weary. Damaged, beaten by wave after wave of grief and loss and still standing. The smiling stone woman in Elrond's garden was her daughter. Little Artanis, to have a daughter! Elrond's sons were her grandchildren, which was quite unthinkable.

“Yes,” said Galadriel. “I am sailing because I have longed to, and because my long war is over: and because I must. I can bear Middle-earth no longer.”

Grief rose in Maglor's throat. None of their cousins or siblings—fair and noble and glorious as they had been—had lived to be old at all. None had ever come close to being this old, this worn. Was he grieving because Artanis had aged, or because the dead had not? She had been so fierce and young when he saw her last. That had been before she vanished into Melian’s Girdle, and thence over the Ered Luin. She had been less willing to smooth over what had happened than Finrod had been: she had looked through Maglor like he was a stranger to her. She had drawn steel on them at Alqualondë. He had been glad not to find her in Doriath when they had put it to the sword.

When he met Galadriel's eyes again, history rose between them in a bloody wave.

Alqualondë, and Doriath, and Sirion. Each inexcusable, each impossible, each a heap of dead she flung at his feet. The bodies of Teleri rose up from the black water of his memory, red dye running through their silver hair, and their dead faces briefly those of Angrod and Aegnor, Finrod, Galadriel herself before they slipped again under the surface.

Dior Eluchíl opened his dead grey eyes and smiled at Maglor, and the lovely shape of his smile was the same as Elladan’s.

Egalmoth was offering him a drinking-cup on the trampled grass of Turgon’s battlefield ascension, and then he was dying in the fens of Sirion with a Fëanorian blade in his belly.

Elwing was looking at him across time, her face hollow with shadows and pinched with terror. She was holding out the Silmaril to him.

Maglor recoiled from it.

He could remember wanting it with every beat of his heart. How the Oath had sung in his blood! In his own voice, as he had sung when he swore it, as he locked the chains around himself by his own free will.

But the Oath was gone. It had been fulfilled the moment he had taken a Silmaril in his hand at last and felt it turn to fire, and now he could smell his own skin burning again, and the stench of burning hair. Maedhros was burning, too. Maedhros was walking away, towards one of the sulphuric craters where the earth had split open in order to belch flame—

“Enough,” Galadriel said, breaking their gaze. The smoke and smell disappeared.

Maglor wiped his face on his sleeve. Tears again. It was getting to be a problem. “Was that really necessary?”

“If you mean to sail, I needed to know.”

“—Elrond wishes me to,” he said. “And the children will have enough to do, to rebuild and to build anew. They need no ancient shadows blocking their light, now that Sauron is gone.”

“You did not come out to fight him,” Galadriel said. “I had wondered if you might.”

“It was better for you all that I did not.”

“Always such excellent excuses! Elrond wishes you to sail. Do you mean to?”

“I think -- I think I must try, if there is a ship that will carry me.”

“Nai hiruvalyë Valimar,” said his cousin, and her great weariness showed itself again in the softness of her voice. It was not permission, but it was wistful, worn out. “Perhaps even you shall find it.”

“Have we come to the end of Thingol’s ban?”

“To the end of everything,” said Galadriel. They sat together in the small white room, the only ones of their house left, who had come over the sea so long ago.

She was as silent when she left as when she came, and he felt the light of her spirit receding into the dark.

-

Her husband was here in the house of Elrond, too. Galadriel was leaving him behind when she left Middle-earth. Celeborn wasn’t sailing, the twins told him. And he knew Maglor was here – “Of course he knows!” Elrohir said. “She does! They keep no secrets between them.”

Should he expect another late-night visitor at his door? He would face up to it – he would have to – but he had no appetite left for confronting a Sindarin prince in the white flame of a righteous anger. 

“He’d rather not see you, either!” said Elladan. “Keep avoiding her, and you won’t meet. They won’t leave each other’s side now, until the end.”

The twins weren’t sailing either.

“Why not?” Maglor asked. Their mother was waiting for them on the far shore. Their father was sailing, and their grandmother. (He had managed to pass beyond terror into finding the idea of Galadriel as Elrond’s mother-in-law rather funny). “It will cause your father great sorrow to be parted from all his children, even for a time.”

They looked at each other. Something passed between them.

“You have to be very tired of it all,” Elladan said. “You have to be ready to leave Middle-earth, and all its people, and all its joys. That doesn’t mean you won’t miss them! Only that all Elves seem to come in the end to a point where the staying can no longer outweigh the going— time itself becomes a burden. Our own balance has not tilted yet.”

“It may never,” said Elrohir, with a brief smile. “It is a difficult thing, to have a choice.”

-

Leave everything. Middle-earth and its joys, the work of their hands and the lands they loved. People they loved, or could love. Go.

Civilisation was cumulative. It built up as slowly as the stonework in a wall, as skills and art and literature grew one layer over the other. And it could be lost. The Elves who sailed would take what they knew with them. Middle-earth would lose it.

Maglor wasn’t an artist. It had never been his own craft, but he and his brothers had been as carefully faceted once as their father’s gems, made many-sided, raised to put their hands to every kind of craft before they cleaved to one only. He was his mother’s son, and his mother had valued the ability to hold up a mirror to nature and to memory.

He was the only one left who remembered Elwing’s face as it had been on the day she threw herself into the water. Elrond would be seeing her soon enough, if Glorfindel was right: if she was waiting there on the other side of the sea that was more than a sea.

But his sons would linger here a while yet. Their sister had chosen to bind her life to her lover's and to Middle-earth itself. There would be more children born to Elros’s line, on and on into the future. They should all should know what Maglor knew: how Elwing had looked on the day she jumped. What they had said, what he had done. For the children who would inherit Middle-earth, he drew the girl on the cliffs of Sirion, with her wide eyes and her thin shoulders.

Then he drew Elros as he remembered him best. Not Tar-Minyatur, King of Men, with his winged crown. That was how history, and Gondor, knew him already. There were paintings and statues of kings in winged crowns enough. Maglor put on paper a young boy with velvety cropped hair and delicate shadows beneath his eyes. He caught Elros for a moment suspended in time, in action, as he had always been: hands movinv, the gesture rendered more sketchily than his face. He was gone, but he should be remembered as more than a legend.

His portrait needed a partner. They had always been looped together in Maglor’s mind, and he would show them like that to the future. He sketched Elrond not as he was now, but as he had been when he lived among the Fëanorians, his long hair drawn back from his face. The bones had been further from the surface of the boy’s skin than they were on his adult face, his cheeks softer. The brow had already been fretted. If Elros was movement, his twin had been stillness, water without a ripple.

Was it enough? There had been four of them, in the ruined wastes of Ossiriand.

He had remembered Maedhros too long as he had been in the moments just before he died, his face a mask of agony and his eyes like cinders. He tried to turn back a page in his memory, to find Maedhros in Ossiriand. The hard, remote Maedhros Elrond and Elros had known: and had, impossibly, loved.

Maedhros’s face then had been worn and grave, like a statue that had once been highly polished and finished, but which had been left out in the winter to blur and soften, to suffer water and frost, to slowly lose its sharp perfection, its sleekness, and to become more beautiful in its ruination. It had been a face that held history, that remembered agonies suffered and agonies inflicted.

Maedhros had never flinched from hard truths. That was why he had walked into the fire, and Maglor had lingered on the sea-shore.

-

There was singing in the Hall of Fire on the night before the great convoy left Rivendell for the Grey Havens. Lord Celeborn kept to his rooms, so Maglor allowed Elrond and his sons to persuade him into sitting in a dark corner of that great hall to hear the singing.

There were songs in Sindarin, and in Quenya, and in the soft dialect of the Silvan Elves. There were songs in the Common Tongue, and in Mannish languages that had passed out of use. There were bright songs, and sad songs. There were great lays, and short melodies; there was laughter, and there was weeping.

They sang of both great matters and small pleasures. Sun-shine on the golden leaves of the trees of Lothlorien in bloom, and the beauty of the green marches of Ard-galen in the days before the Flame. Oropher and his brave doomed archers on the wasted plains of the Dagorlad: Gil-galad riding away into the darkness with his starry shield and his shining helm. Fingolfin’s ride and his calling-out of Morgoth before the fastness of Angband.

They sang of Lúthien the Fair, dancing in the dark, with the white flowers blooming at her feet. Tinúviel and her brave Beren, and the awful death of Finrod’s. Galadriel did not weep, but as the harpers sung of her brother’s battle with Sauron Maglor saw in her face the same look he had surprised on Elrond’s when they stood in Celebrían’s ancient garden: a grief grown mellow, a long sadness turning to anticipation like the coming of the dawn. Did she think to find Finrod again on the far shore?

They sang of how Lúthien had brought down the walls of Sauron’s Tower, and of how she had sung Morgoth to sleep, and of the knife that had cut the Silmaril from his brow. Maglor’s brother had made that knife. His dead brothers were in Lúthien’s story, and they were monsters.

Maglor did not protest from his place in the shadows. It was not untrue, though it was not the only truth. And there were other stories they sung: Fingon cutting Maedhros from Thangorodrim, that homecoming against all hope on the back of an eagle. An eagle coming for the new heroes left huddling on the slopes of Orodruin.

They sang of Celebrimbor, waiting on the steps of the Hall of the Mírdain for Sauron to come. Celebrimbor, refusing him what he wanted to know, and dying for it.

They sang of Men and of Women, loved and lost, forever out of reach. Of blazing pride and great deeds and terrible ruin, of lost Westernesse. Do the bells still ring in Andustar beneath the waves? they asked. Do they still sing in Armenelos?

Glorfindel recited a lay of Gondolin which sounded like very like something which had been sung, once, in Tirion, his voice as clear and pure as a skylark: but he left it to another to sing of its fall.

Towards the morning, Elrond came forth to stand at the great harp, the lord of the Hall taking up his seat for the last time. There was a silver circlet of braided mithril on his dark head, and he wore russet and gold over blue silk embroidered in starbursts of pearls. With a gentle smile for the small grey guest seated in a place of honour, he sang a lay of Eärendil in no meter Maglor had ever heard before, rendered into the Common Tongue:

There flying Elwing came to him

and flame was in the darkness lit

more bright than light of diamond

the fire upon her carcanet!

The rhyming scheme was a little strained, but Maglor found himself weeping when the song turned to Valinor: to its white shores and its high and holy Mountain, to the waves of Eldamar and the hill of Ilmarin, the lamplit towers of Tirion. The white city of his youth seemed to rise before him for a moment, pale and fragile as egg-shell.

Others sang of love lost and love betrayed, of love against all reason. They sang of Elf-maids and mortals, of flowers in spring and cities that had fallen, of Oromë’s horse shining silver through the black trees. They sang of the starlight as it first fell at Cuiviénen. They sang about the sea.

“Maglor,” Elrond said. He had come to stand beside him. “Will you sing?”

He could deny Elrond nothing.

Maglor rose, and went to the great harp. For a moment, he thought to play the Noldolantë. No one else had. He could give them the death of the Two Trees, and the mourning of the Elves in Tirion. He could take them back to the beginning of this final end: to his father’s speech in the Great Square, and the red torches blazing against the utter blackness. He could give them the Oath, and seven bright and beautiful and fell princes of Tirion, he and his brothers as they had once been, swearing themselves to the Silmarils until the world’s end. Neither law nor love / nor league of swords…

He took his own harp from its case where it was lashed to his back. He had built it with wood he had cut with his own hands. It had been made to nestle against his right shoulder, to give his uninjured left hand better access to the lower strings. He had been working since he came to Rivendell on restringing it. Its voice was clear now, if not powerful: silver and a little mournful, like the sea had gotten into it.

He gave them not the Noldolantë, but the wedding-song he had written for Elrond’s daughter and Elros’s heir. It ended with a blessing that was a farewell: May all your days be joy.

No one slept. They sang through the night, in a last flowering of Elvenesse before it passed away forever, and in the morning, they set out for the Havens.

-

“Elrond,” he said breathlessly, when they were in sight of the sea. The burns had not seeped through their bandaging in the hours since it had last been changed. It hurt like always when he moved his fingers, but when he held still —“Elrond, it isn’t burning any longer.”

-

There were stories about sailing that they told up and down the coasts. He had heard them in many tongues and many forms over the years. Men claimed to have lost their bearings at sea and to have sailed into shining mists: to have glimpsed through them, for a moment, the white and golden lights of the quays of Avallónë. Then, they said, the wind had shifted, and the world across the water had vanished from their sight.

Others claimed that men had gone further still: they had sailed close enough to gaze from afar upon the White Mountain, dreadful and beautiful, and died of it.

Maglor did not know if the Straight Way would open for him. He did not know what waited for him beyond. But he found himself willing to sail, if only to see the lamplit towers of Tirion once more through the mist.